Data Storage

Over a number of years there has been a long and hard fought battle to secure the ability to‘accelerate anywhere’any data type to, from and across a cloud area network (ClAN) to allow fast access to applications, or to secure data as a part of a back-up and archiving strategy. According to Claire Buchanan, chief commercial officer at self-configuring infrastructure optimise networks (SCION) vendor Bridgeworks, this battle is still ongoing. With the use of traditional WAN optimisation techniques the long drawn out battle has still to be won.

“It may not long be the case as with the advent of machine intelligence and technologies such as SCION, The problem has been that of small pipes and the inability to accelerate data. Therefore, the use of deduping and compression tools have been the only way to gain a perceived performance improvement”, she explains...

Hard-disk drive maker Western Digital is buying SanDisk for about $19 billion. The deal is expected to increase Western Digital's ability to make flash memory storage chips used in smartphones and tablets. Western Digital needs access to SanDisk's NAND technology to better compete in the market for solid-state drives used in cloud computing, data centres, smartphones and laptops. With this, Western Digital said it will double its addressable market and expand its participation in higher-growth segments.

"The combined company will be ideally positioned to capture the growth opportunities created by the rapidly evolving storage industry," said Steve Milligan, chief executive officer, Western Digital. Both companies have strong R&D and engineering capabilities and over 15,000 combined patents issued or pending worldwide...

Quobyte, technology leader in data center file systems, starting rolling out version 1.2 of its next-generation software storage system. Tried and tested in production, Quobyte presents the first fault-tolerant storage system that provides an all-in-one solution for an OpenStack infrastructure, hosting virtual machines, shared file systems and object storage in a single software-defined deployment.

“Google and Amazon raised the bar high. Their fault-tolerant horizontal software storage infrastructure is based on commodity hardware and yields unprecedented levels of agility, scale and operational cost savings. We’re excited to announce that Quobyte now allows its users to catch up with with these qualities and that it is available for deployments of all sizes,” said Felix Hupfeld, CTO at Quobyte...

The term “bandwidth” has been used in Electrical Engineering for years to mean “the difference between the upper and lower frequencies in a continuous set of frequencies, measured in hertz”. In the early 1990’s Telcos started to use the term “bandwidth” to describe the volume of data handled and defined it as “the transmission rate of data across a network”. Bandwidth in data transmission is measured in bits per second and it represents the capacity of network connection. Increase in the capacity means improved performance, considering other factors like latency. We will further discuss the effects of utilisation of bandwidth to the challenges associated with cloud computing.

Cloud computing providers usually calculate required bandwidth of customers just by considering the available quantity of bandwidth as well as the mean bandwidth utilisation needed by variety of applications. In addition, cloud computing providers consider latencies in transmission to calculate the required time to upload both the initial backup and all subsequent backups. For that reason, Internet based cloud backup service providers work hard to enhance the overall Internet bandwidth. They also do everything within their power to reduce the amount of data that flows through their pipes...

Amazon has revealed a pretty substantial piece of hardware for transferring large amounts of data to the cloud. Amazon Snowball weighs a hefty 50 pounds and can be used to store up to 50 TB of data before being shipped to Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS hasn’t really entered the hardware market before, but Snowball does fit the company ethos of helping customers gain access to cloud computing.

Some businesses find data migration to the cloud challenging, particularly when dealing with magnitudes in the order of terabytes or petabytes. Slow Internet speeds or inadequate network infrastructure can make wireless transfers impractical. Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for Amazon Web Services, believes that as the latest addition to the company’s Import/Export service, Snowball can provide a genuine boost for business customers...

Dell Inc., the world's third largest personal computer maker, is in talks to buy data storage company EMC Corp, a person familiar with the matter said, in what could be one of the biggest technology deals ever. A deal could be an option for EMC, under pressure from activist investor Elliott Management Corp to spin off majority-owned VMware Inc.

The terms being discussed were not known, but if the deal goes through it would top Avago Technologies' $37 billion offer for Broadcom. EMC has a market value of about $50 billion. Dell is also in talks with banks to finance an all-cash offer for EMC, the person told Reuters on condition of anonymity as the talks were confidential...

With the number of paying organizations using Google Drive crossing the one million mark earlier this year, Google appears to be ramping up its efforts to bolster the cloud storage service's security features. The cloud services giant introduced new features on Sept. 21 that are intended to give organizations more visibility and control over business files stored and shared by workers in Google Drive.

The new features add retention and legal hold capabilities to the existing collection of e-discovery capabilities available with Google Drive. The new functions are similar to those available from Google for email and chat, and they’re designed to help businesses fulfill their legal obligations pertaining to data archiving and removal...

Cloud computing is being touted by many, especially vendors, as the path to take as businesses grow. Cloud advocates say that the elasticity that cloud provides is difficult to replicate in on-premises networks and sooner than later, businesses will be considering using services in the cloud.

Major vendors are developing data centers in many countries to alleviate concerns regarding the data leaving the country. However, the benefits of using services in the cloud usually out perform any concerns. In an interview with Networks Asia, Aravindan Anandan, Consulting Systems Engineer, Asia Pacific, Barracuda Networks (India) Pte Ltd. talks about the benefits of cloud computing and its role in storage management, such as disaster recovery and backup...

The cloud is where the action is in enterprise storage. Sales are way up for little-known manufacturers that sell directly to big cloud companies like Google and Facebook, while the market for traditional external storage systems is shrinking, according to research company IDC.

Internet giants and service providers typically don't use specialized storage platforms in their sprawling data centers. Instead, they buy vast amounts of capacity in the form of generic hardware that's controlled by software. As users flock to cloud-based services, that's a growing business...

The Boston tech industry is entering a new age of enterprise IT. Long known for its companies in data storage, networking, and business software, the local sector is seeing a boom in startups that have a new spin on these traditional fields. One of them is ClearSky Data, a roughly two-year-old effort from founders Ellen Rubin and Laz Vekiarides (pictured) that is finally talking today about what it’s building.

Rubin, the company’s CEO, previously worked at Netezza and co-founded CloudSwitch, while Vekiarides was a veteran of EqualLogic. All of those companies were eventually acquired for big money—by IBM, Verizon, and Dell, respectively. ClearSky raised $12 million from General Catalyst and Highland Capital Partners early last year...